The Temptation of Neuroscience

Undecided voters lay inside a sleek fMRI machine in late 2007. The magnetic coil pulsed, scanning the blood flow in their brains. Images of Hilary Clinton, Mitt Romney, John Edwards, and other primary contestants flashed before their eyes.

The UCLA neuroscientists and Washington political operatives who ran the study presented their findings in a New York Times article, “This Is Your Brain on Politics.” The “voter impressions on which this election may turn” were displayed in a colorful slideshow of (statistical combinations of) brains: here the medial orbital prefrontal cortex is orange, indicating an “emotional connection” with Democrats; here the amygdala flashes, betraying anxiety about Mitt Romney.

“It really was a bit of a fiasco,”she told NYT columnist David Brooks, who was moderating a conversation with Satel and psychologist Scott Lilienfeld.“The fact that something lights up doesn’t mean you hate Hillary Clinton, or you’re going to vote for someone else. It almost read like a parody, the way they had boiled it down to an almost stick figure kind of narrative.”

The wild exaggeration of neuroscience—both of specific findings, and of the field’s primacy in understanding human nature more generally—has drawn the ire of savvy bloggers and tome-writing intellectuals for years. The exposure of Jonah Lehrer, neuroscience’s most prominent popularizer, as a plagiarist and a fabricator also occasioned a critical look at the popsci genre he championed. But Satel and Lilienfeld’s book may represent the high water mark of anti-pop neuroscience writing so far: it is widely reviewed, and Brooks plugged Brainwashedin his weekly New York Times column. (Brooks freely admits he himself has succumbed to neuromania: “I wrote a book a couple years ago of mindless neuroscience, and it did really well!” he quipped at the AEI event.)

Anti-pop neuroscience, as opposed anti-neuroscience, is the key distinction. Satel and Lilienfeld want to clean up the riffraff because neuroscience done right is a sophisticated and promising field of inquiry. They are not here to argue, as Brooks did in his recent column, that the mind is not the brain, or even that we have free will outside of the causal chain of our neural firings.

Rather, the uses and abuses of neuroscience are more illustrative as a story of our tendency to get ahead of ourselves. Our perennial thirst for elegant mechanisms and overarching narratives, noble in its own right, can lead us to take lazy shortcuts and place our hope in the Next Big Explanation, whether phrenology, Freud, or Freakonomics. Culture, history, and politics are complicated, confusing, and mostly boring. With the recent successes of neuroscience, it’s easy to wish that the chatter of narratives, prejudices, habits, and emotion could be replaced with the clinical pings of the fMRI machine.

But for now, at least, it would seem that neuroscience has a long way to go before it supersedes our other ways of knowing: “This Is Your Brain on Politics” identified two 2007 candidates who had failed to fire up the neurons of swing voters, indicating impending trouble for their campaigns. They were John McCain and Barack Obama.

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7 Responses to The Temptation of Neuroscience

Words that, astonishingly, don’t appear anywhere in this article: “media”, “press”, “journalists.” What you’re talking about has nothing to do with any actual problems in neuroscience – fMRI studies produce genuine, replicable data if the sampling is done correctly, and the basic theory is completely sound – and far, far more to do with the state of science journalism, which in general is awful. Science journalists rarely have any sort of scientific or technical writing background; if the paper in question even has a science desk, it’s usually staffed by people who are just killing time on their way into lucrative sports or opinion writing. As a result, they have only one strategy for producing acceptable journalism – try to “boil down” the reported discovery (read: completely hyperbolize it) into some kind of relevant-to-the-reader effect, which usually completely exaggerates both the significance of the finding and the researcher’s confidence in it.

If one had to judge the legitimacy of any field of scientific endeavor by virtue of how it was reported in newspaper, it’s not likely that any of them would come out looking legitimate. As a result, people whose only exposure to the state of scientific knowledge come away, over time, adamant that scientists don’t know anything at all. After all, they’re reading story after breathless story about some new incredible finding which is immediately and breathlessly contradicted the next week.

What you’re talking about has nothing to do with any actual problems in neuroscience – fMRI studies produce genuine, replicable data if the sampling is done correctly, and the basic theory is completely sound

@Justin, Thanks for weighing in. I agree with the thrust of your remarks, and I hope my post doesn’t indicate otherwise. Cf.

Anti-pop neuroscience, as opposed anti-neuroscience, is the key distinction. Satel and Lilienfeld want to clean up the riffraff because neuroscience done right is a sophisticated and promising field of inquiry.

In 1994 or 95, in preparation for several discussions on memory. A great deal of research challenged the idea of repressed memories. As soon as I saw the word “POP” I was reminded of that reasearch during the hieght of the child abuse and satanic practices scandals throughout the country and the techniques used to obtain such memories. Much of that psycho therapy is part of the mainstream today — frightening.

This discussion seems late, but a definition or claryfication of what is “POP’ science would be helpful hear.

I also like Justin’s import here that technical writing is part of the problem.

One of my all-time favorites, Andrew Sullivan, just linked to this piece and had the following to say in response:

Without religion or a shared culture, science has assumed a role it is not qualified to play: a judgment of the whole, not just of its relevant area of inquiry. Don’t get me wrong: science is a vital mode of human thought; it is also just part of it. History, aesthetics, prudence, morals, virtues: these it cannot understand; and when it tries to explain them, it is not wrong, so to speak. It’s just irrelevant.

Thoughts? I think I agree with Sullivan, as far as it goes. We might differ once we start talking about what science could in principle tell us. I think on that end I’m probably more scientistic than Sullivan. But as things stand now? Yes, the fields that Sullivan identifies are for the most part autonomous from science and better than science at answering the questions they ask. It might not stay that way.